The problem of stress has become a major issue in our time,
yet our life conditions are less stressful than those of our ancestors.
How often do we have to flee from a wild animal, or face constant
physical threats from the environment as did early man in whom
the stress response first emerged? The answer is never, or at
worst most infrequently. Conditions in contemporary society are
less stressful than those of previous generations. Our society
does, however, face problems of stress, many of which are created
by changes in technologically advanced societies. The demands
that trigger the same 'fight or flight' mechanisms that enabled
our ancestors to survive may no longer be appropriate to the modern
age, yet nevertheless still exist.

Technological progress needs some kind of working definition
in order that a more meaningful discussion may arise. Here, technological
progress will be defined as 'those changes which have been brought
about in our society by the impact of the microchip, with particular
regard to the computer'. These changes are seen throughout our
everyday lives; in the supermarket, where bar codes are scanned
by optical character readers (OCRs), the checkout operative may
be placed under pressure to scan an increasingly large number
of items in a shorter and shorter time as queues build at busy
shopping times. This could of course place the operative under
stress. Similarly, the shopper waiting to collect and pack purchases,
may be placed in a situation of tension and stress as OCRs can
generally scan faster than one person can pack. How often does
one come away from a checkout in a store feeling exhausted, not
from the physical work, but from the emotional demands of not
wanting to delay anyone else in the queue? At quiet times the
checkout operative may suffer from boredom stress in that there
is nothing to do, but sit on guard duty over their technological
emporium. Changes in many offices have involved the introduction
of computerised systems, whereby each member of staff is linked
to another through a network, thus removing the old-established
face-to-face dealing. This may result in a silent world where
social skills and creative conversation and ideas are diminished,
or even become extinct.

It must be acknowledged that the rate of technological change
is greater than it has ever been. This rate of change affects
the nature of work at all levels and in many organisations. There
have always been changes , but the current rate far exceeds previous
rates and as such technological progress may cause workers to
be concerned about their jobs and therefore must be considered
as a cause of stress. Hall (1969) has likened the rapidly developing
technology with a motor car, "whose driver is steadily pressing
down on the accelerator of an increasingly powerful engine. The
view behind recedes more quickly, the surrounding scenery becomes
more quickly unfamiliar, and the speed of the movement gives one
a feeling of strangeness and insecurity."

Davis and Blomstrom (1975) have observed an analogous situation
to that described by Lewis Carroll (1865) in Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland : "You have to run as fast as you can to stay
where you are." Both these views would appear to support
the contention that technological change per.se. does not necessarily
cause stress, but that it is the rate of technological change
which leads to stress.

Technological change where job security is threatened
, coupled with feelings of not being able to adapt to a new situation
are causes of stress amongst the workforce. In the early 1980's,
technological change must have caused stress to the workforce
of National Cash Register (NCR), where the invention of a tiny
silicone chip that replaced most of the mechanical parts used
in making cash registers led to a drastic downsizing of the workforce;
at Dayton, Ohio, the workforce was reduced from 20000 to 5000,
and world-wide from 103000 to 65000 employees. Not only was the
workforce diminished, but the nature of the jobs was also dramatically
altered. Thus job insecurity, job loss and job changes would be
contributory factors in increasing workplace stress in employees.

Maharishi Mahesh Yoga has defined stress as 'that which
blocks the full expression of creative intelligence'. Hence he
discusses the relationship between stress and creative intelligence.
In certain respects there appears to be confusion here in that
it has been established that creativity and intelligence are different
and separable (Wallace and Kogan, 1965), where individuals may
be divided into four distinct groups : creative and intelligent;
creative but not intelligent; not creative but intelligent; and
not creative and not intelligent. However, the basic thrust of
his argument is taken to mean that stress causes people to under-perform,
and that technology could remove the more mundane aspects of life
and allow the individual to concentrate on higher level things.
Yes, it must be true to say that people should be free to express
their creative intelligence and that computer technology allows
us to do this, but only up to a point. An individual using a computer
program may feel that they are being creative, but they can only
be as free to be creative within that program as the person who
wrote the program has allowed. No program yet produced can possibly
take into account all nuances of individual thought and channels
every individual would like to follow and so in this respect the
incentive to develop creative intelligence further has been removed.
It could be argued that the truly creative person is the developer
of the program, but again this is constrained by the type of computer
package under consideration. An interesting avenue to explore
along this particular path is that of artificial intelligence,
where problem solving, itself a core value of creativity, is effected
by computer. Many psychologists hold the view that humans and
computers are similar in that they are both information-processing
systems and as such exhibit similarity between the sequence of
inferred events in human memory and the actual steps of a computer
program that handles the storage and retrieval of various materials.
Newell and Simon (1972) were able to produce reasonably good simulations
of human performance on a variety of problems with their General
Problem Solver, but the pre-requisite for this was that in the
computer simulation, precise states had to be defined for the
activity to take place. In human activity states for problem solving
are not always so carefully set out, and this is where the application
of creative intelligence comes into play. To reinforce the assertion
made earlier, the creativity of the computer user is only as good
as the routes defined within the computer program and therefore
creative intelligence may not be expressed to the full, it may
become frustrated and lead to the individual experiencing stress.
If this is the way forward through the use of the modern technology
as in the definition, then the individual has been robbed of the
incentive to develop creative intelligence.

The view is advanced here that it is not possible to
render society stress-free, unless that society is sublimated
into an unthinking, unaware state that exists in a rigid environment
that has no vitality. To make society stress-free is to ask its
members always to move away from a potentially stressful situation,
and clearly this is not always possible or even desirable. It
is well recognised that where an individual is placed under no
or too little pressure that stress will occur through boredom
and performance will be low. Clearly, at the other extreme, too
much pressure also leads to stress and again performance tails
off. An intermediate, or optimum state is required and this is
where the importance of being able to manage stress is required.
The contention here is that all individuals react differently
to real or imagined threats, individual coping methods will be
necessary. In summary, to make society as stressproof as possible
it is suggested that individuals cope with stress by learning
to avoid situations they know will cause them stress; they cope
with stress by learning to change their perceptions of situations
and the labels they attach to them; and they cope with stress
by controlling the stress response by doing such things as taking
exercise to become fitter, learn how to switch off and learn appropriate
techniques of relaxation.